“Alice Voinescu was a great lecturer, she gave lectures full of substance, with great effect at the time”

Stelian Tănase: Tell me about some figures, personalities and people who have crossed your existence…

Alexandru Paleologu: Among the people who have played a leading role in my life, I always mention Alice Voinescu when I am asked. I have spoken about her many times and I still do. I always have something to say about her and that’s because she was my father’s oldest friend and I was a friend of hers. Because we had reached a great degree of intimacy, I considered her a close relative, and because she played a great role, almost as great as my father, I can’t help mentioning her whenever it comes to my early and later intellectual training.

When I was four or five years old, my father got into a carriage with me and gave the address, Calea Călărașilor, I don’t remember the number. When we got there, I saw a house with a garden, with a stone staircase at the entrance, with a porch. A button on my blouse had fallen off. Someone appeared, a kind of fairy, yes, yes, a kind of fairy, who took my blouse, sat down on her knees on the front steps (my father had settled into a deckchair) and sewed my button back on. She told me her name was Aunt Alice. She was a woman in her late forties who I thought was beautiful, divine. She thought she was ugly, everyone thought she was ugly because she had bad skin. But she had an extraordinary grace of movement, a harmonious and well-proportioned body, a pleasant voice, not without a certain roughness, but pleasant in its embrace and articulation, in the way she spoke. Her charm was youthful. That day she was wearing a white dress with yellow flowers, her hair was still grey, like a foam on her head, not quite a wig, but loose, combed without much pedantry, but giving an 18th century impression. Since then I have always seen her like that, and she has given me cards on various occasions. First, French or German books with medieval or ancient legends. Once she gave me a Piazza edition, not exactly deluxe, but very nice looking, The Legend of the Cid. Or, in the same collection, Le roman de Tristan et Iseult by Joseph Bedier. Whether I read them immediately or not, the important thing was that I had them. I read many of them later. When I was 13 or 14, he gave me Dante’s Divine Comedy and Opere Minori, two volumes, in the Italian Salani edition, a popular but beautiful edition, white hardback but with Florentine lilies, gilt. I didn’t read them until late, after I had read Dante, in Coșbuc’s translation, first when I was 16 and then more thoroughly when I was 38. Only then did I read the volumes that Aunt Alice had given me decades before.

I don’t know how important an intellectual, moral and human dialogue was born between us. She was a woman you could talk to about anything, even the most intimate things. She was a remarkable confidante and many people abused her patience. She spent a lot of time listening to people’s petty and dramatised stories. For example, to listen to the actresses and girls at the conservatory who were her students and who told her intimate turpitudes in a dramatised form.

I remember a story my father told me later. Around `22-`23, a women’s association (Y.W.C.A. or perhaps the Romanian Orthodox Women) commissioned her to carry out a psychological, ethical and social survey in the houses of prostitution in Banat and Ardeal. I don’t know how she got their addresses, I don’t know how this “passage to hell” happened to her, a person who was completely outside any probability of penetrating the darkness of this world. The fact is that, in various cities, she listened to hundreds of confidences, apocryphal or real, all of them heartbreaking, which turned her upside down. On his return journey to Arad, to the Arlberg, I think, or on another international train, he found Octavian Goga at a table in the dining car, who had just finished a ham and eggs with port and was lighting a Havana to taste his Courvoisier bubble – these brands were also available in our Cook Company carriages at that time. With tears in her eyes, Alice Voinescu told him everything she had heard, the humiliations, the brutalities, the hopes, the illusions, the constant degradation of these beings. Goga listened politely, with short, monosyllabic interventions. Two or three days later, Goga met my father in town and said to him: “My son, have you seen what our Alice is doing?”

Let’s come back to Alice Voinescu.

I always told her she was very beautiful, which made her laugh, and others accused me of hypocrisy or impudence. But that’s how I saw her and that’s what I thought. She was indeed very slender and graceful, always dressed simply and beautifully. I remember her at home in her indoor clothes, in winter a long dark green or black velvet dress with lace at the cuffs, in summer a cashmere dress, either grey or beige. She had a way of creating a relaxed atmosphere, an atmosphere of intimacy and absolute courtesy. Something like the old French or even Romanian salons of days gone by.

Alice, née Steriade, was married to the lawyer Stello Voinescu, a very clever but sterile man, rather handsome, who wore a monocle with a string and a black frame, which he sometimes let fall spectacularly on his waistcoat. I remember him well dressed, with a gambit pulled back a little and a clay coat always open. He didn’t plead much, he was a legal adviser to the Ministry of Education. He was a party animal, in a circle of famous actors and drinkers, and he made life difficult for Alice, who adored him and overlooked everything.

Alice Voinescu took her doctorate in Paris in 1910 or 1911 with a thesis on the neo-Kantian school of Marburg. She had spent several years in Marburg in the neo-Kantian philosophical milieu with Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, N. Hartmann and others. Ortega y Gasset was also there. In her interview with I. Biberi, she tells how she first met H. Cohen, an elderly professor with a very bourgeois home, who scrupulously respected the custom of direct relations between teachers and students, as it was then. The professor asked her if she was religious. Yes,” Alice replied, “I am Orthodox and a practising Catholic. “All right, Miss Steriade, but contact with our philosophy – which is agnostic – might upset you.” But Alice replied, “Oh, no, my faith is unshakable, and anyway, philosophy is one thing, religion is another. It’s an attitude with which I completely agree. Philosophy doesn’t have to be religious and religion doesn’t have to be philosophical, although they may interfere on some intellectual level. […] 

Let me come back to Alice Voinescu.

After her doctorate at the Sorbonne on Herman Cohen and the neo-Kantian school of Marburg, Alice Voinescu was offered a professorship in the USA, which was brilliant for a young Romanian woman, but she didn’t go “because my fiancé was waiting for me in the country”, whom she married. Since there was no question of her becoming a professor at the university – only those from the “Maiorescu stables” had access to philosophy, and a woman had never been mentioned – she went to the conservatory. She quickly won a large audience: like Nae Ionescu, but on a different cultural and emotional level. Alice Voinescu was a great lecturer, she gave lectures full of substance, with great effect at that time. She did not write well, the few books she wrote are clumsily written, you can see the artificial effort to write in the most authentic language possible. She knew from home that she spoke a French-Romanian similar to Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu’s, and she wanted to correct that. He had unfortunate expressions, as I said. The word “duh” in Claudel, which doesn’t work structurally, duh is an Eastern concept. But in speech he had logic, authenticity and coherence. He had a graceful, intoxicating authority. Stello was a little jealous of his wife’s fame and made gestures of frondeur. For example, at a lecture on Descartes at the Foundation, Stello sat very comfortably under the parapet of a box, placed his fur as a pillow on the backrest and pretended to be asleep for the duration of the lecture. Alice noticed, but was not surprised, and saw her amusement at her work. Or not. For years Alice had been going to what were called “Oxford meetings”, interfaith gatherings, not just Christian but of other faiths as well. Alice used to tell interesting stories about these meetings, but my father and Stello Voinescu used to make fun of her too. She didn’t mind, she thought they were nice students, but a bit of a nuisance, the kind who smoked in secret, but basically good boys. She loved Stello very much, as you could see at his funeral in 1940, in the church of Boteanu, although Alice didn’t put on any show. She always spoke of him with love, with longing, but not like an obsessed widow, but convinced that she would find him in eternity. It was to him that she dedicated her first book after his death, Aspects of Contemporary Theatre. The dedication is entirely confessional: “To you, who knew all my thoughts.”

I visited him for a long time, until 1950, when I had to go into hiding. She was also arrested and taken to the Canal for attending some lectures on Plato in a salon – in 1952. She was asked about me, she didn’t know anything, but even if she did… She was beaten, whipped, a woman in her sixties. Then she was forced to live in Târgu Frumos. People found out, people came on pilgrimage, former students, actors, friends. She also wrote some letters to a young man, which were published posthumously.

I saw her afterwards, from 1956 until the beginning of September 1959, when I was arrested. She wanted to give me some letters from Malraux, Gide, Roger Martin du Gard. It’s a good thing I didn’t get them, because two days later I was arrested and I think they would have been lost. Some – I don’t think the most important ones – were published in Manuscriptum. Her friendships with Malraux, Gide, Roger Martin du Gard and Jean Schlumberger were extraordinary. She had met them during the ‘decades of Pointigny’ between the two wars. I remember some of those letters, they were extraordinary. One of them had come from Gide through someone in the French Legation, who gave it to me to give to her, and she would receive the reply in the same way. Gide’s writing was trembling, the writing of an old man confessing his loneliness and grief. All his friends had abandoned him, the French Marxist left could not forgive him for writing a “defamatory” book about Stalin’s Russia. Alice replied more cautiously, but I took the liberty of extending the letter, thinking that I could do the country a service by describing our situation. But Gide was now too old and discredited. It was 1949, ten years before my arrest. Alice Voinescu was arrested in her apartment in the Malaxa block, opposite the Scala bakery. When she returned from Târgu Frumos, she was given a room in the Sanielevici block, in an apartment occupied by a family, Timoșenco was his name, with whom she got on well. On Christmas Eve, she received visits that took place in the whole apartment, not just in her room. Her niece Ana-Maria Muzicescu, the actor Dinu Ianculescu – solemn in public but very funny in private – Ion and Mariana Murnu, her students, friends and others came. She had grown old, like everyone else; my father had died in 1956. I remember that at my trial she was called as a witness for the prosecution, of course only the prosecution could call witnesses. I saw her cross-examination on the record, which avoided everything that could be incriminating against me and was therefore very trivial. That’s why the prosecutor stopped her testimony, and I was sorry because I wanted to ask her some questions that I thought would have been useful to me, but, as I say now, it still wouldn’t have changed anything. It would have been nice to have seen her. During my interrogation I denied a certain statement she had made. Back in my cell I realised she was right and asked to correct the denial. I wanted to do it in court too, precisely to protect her, so that she could not be told: “Look, Paleologu, deny what you say”. From a criminal point of view, of course, it was of no importance.

I knew her when she was between forty and seventy. She didn’t change much. I changed, became young and then mature. But the image of that fairy in white who sewed up my button stayed with me and determined all my subsequent representations of her. This is how I see her: a young lady from an 18th century English portrait by Gains-borough or Reynolds. Her grace, her courtesy, penetrated deeply into my intellectual formation and my choices of social behaviour. She was a fine example of the cosmopolitan Romanian culture and good society of the interwar period. “Good” in the qualitative sense, referring not only to the aristocratic milieu, but also to the petty bourgeoisie capable of coming under the influence of the social and cultural top. Her students at the Conservatoire, who generally came from petty bourgeois backgrounds or from the outskirts of the cities, acquired from her very valuable cultural references and very good suggestions for social and human behaviour.

She retired in the 1950s. I don’t think she was deprived of her pension – it was cut at some point – I think she had some protection, but she had a hard time, though undeservedly hard.

The story of her time in prison?

I remember the story of Elena Brătianu, Gheorghe Brătianu’s wife. One cold spring, Elena Brătianu ran out of shoes and had to go barefoot to work. A peasant woman, also a prisoner, saw her and said: “Oh dear, it’s impossible for Brătianu’s wife to go barefoot” and gave her her shoes, but she refused. It was not difficult for a woman who had also lived in the country to go barefoot. Imprisonment gave her, like so many others, the knowledge of evil. Alice knew that there was great suffering, great drama, but abstractly, literally. When she judged the world, she did not represent the cruelty, the wickedness, the evil, the pain, even though she had visited the brothels of Transylvania. She came out of prison in her sixties – mature. In any case, she tells her story with humour, intelligence and the feeling – which every educated person who goes to prison has – that she has learned something from the experience.

(Alexandru Paleologu, Defiance of Memory (Conversations) April 1988 – October 1989, Du Style Publishing House, Bucharest, 1996, pp. 121-133)